Mission Asset Fund - 2014 Community Leadership Awards

Sarah Kamya is a school counselor in New York City. She began the project Little Diverse Libraries on June 3rd and has already raised over $13,000, supported black owned bookstores, and has distributed 775 books to Little Free Libraries across all 50 states. Sarah is helping educate communities while most importantly amplifying and empowering black voices.

Mère-Bi is a 2008 documentary film about Annette Mbaye d'Erneville by her son, director Ousmane William Mbaye. The first Senegalese female journalist, she was deeply involved in the development of her country. Both an activist and a non-conformist, she fought for the emancipation of women from the beginning.

Political engagement spawned the wildest of wonderlands for Hong Kong’s creativity – but as a new law annihilates freedom of expression overnight, underground artists and creatives find themselves targets, and their works disappeared. Together we race to preserve the creative uprising amid China’s crackdown.

Environmental activists Thor, Hulk, Black Panther, Captain Anarchy and Batman illegally occupy Mormont Hill. They create a utopian model of society while waging a peaceful struggle against the enemy: the cement industry. Far from any society, these activists invent, create and reclaim a threatened site. A new threat looms when the police announce that they will soon be evicted. Zadvengers offers a poetic and personal vision of the reality of activism in the "Zones to be Defended" (ZADs).

Song of Ceylon was commissioned for the short-lived German TV-series Telekritik and broadcasted in 1975. In Telekritik documentary approaches were analysed and made available for a critique of contemporary TV, its aesthetics and modes of production. Other authors for the series include Hartmut Bitomsky, Rainer Gansera and Klaus Wildenhahn.In the 30-minute movie, Farocki shows and comments on excerpts from the film Song of Ceylon by Basil Wright (and a short segment of Eisenstein's Mexico-fragments). Farocki's voice-over describes part of the movie, focussing on details and montage. He also uses didactic and descriptive drawings and intertitles to confront the classic documentary and its stylistic approaches with contemporary TV.

Going into my interview with Laurel Greenfield, I thought the majority of our conversation would be about her inspiration for painting food and why she chose to pursue painting as a career. We spoke about that but ended up having a much bigger conversation about pursuing a creative career. We talked a lot about finding the balance between having a business plan and taking a leap of faith into the unknown, something anyone pursuing a creative field on their own can relate to.

The Numbers Start with the River is a 1971 American short documentary film about small-town life in Iowa. Produced by Donald Wrye for the United States Information Agency, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

A short film mostly comprised of two sources: research footage from 1988 about the beginnings of the HIV epidemic from the perspective of medical professionals, and an interview with Cleve Jones in 2003 as he looks back upon his activism, and the state of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 2000s.

When a tragedy strikes the worlds most unique skate park, a dogged group of old school skaters, BMXers and street artists team up to fight for its survival.

In interviews, various actors and directors discuss their careers and their involvement in the making of what has come to be known as "cult" films. Included are such well-known genre figures as Russ Meyer, Curtis Harrington, Cameron Mitchell and James Karen.

Before South Africa’s apartheid government in the 1970’s destroyed District Six, being gay, or “moffie,” was an accepted part of this racially and religiously diverse community in Cape Town. Kewpie's hairdressing salon was the epicenter of this culture, a meeting place where the “girls” organized drag balls and cabaret performances, all of which are captured through her amazing collection of snapshots.

This short explores the possibility that Louis XVII, son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, escaped death during the French Revolution and was raised by Indians in America.

From the slow waitings for opening of the big top to the loneliness in the dressing room backstage, Abuhadba follows the life of a small circus in Chile run entirely by a traditional circus family.

A fond farewell to London's trams - whose peculiarly endearing qualities were discovered only at the threat of their disappearance.

The film questions whether the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s effectively changed the Black community, and American society more widely, and examines the notion of Black power itself. Greaves interviewed major Black leaders, such as Franklin Thomas, Clifton Wharton Jr., Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Lerone Bennett Jr. to present a candid take on issues within the African American community, revealing wider societal problems in America at large.

With depth, intimacy, and humor, FLOAT! captures filmmaker Azza Cohen's magnetic grandma’s life-affirming journey learning to swim at 82, inspiring audiences to defy societal expectations of aging and to boldly look forward at every stage.

Shoal Lake 40 women talk about their struggles, and those of their parents and grandparents, in trying to raise their families in a hazardous state of enforced isolation. Everyone in the community has a harrowing story of a loved one falling through the ice while trying to get across the lake, with pregnant women and new mothers fearing for their babies and having no choice but to make the trek in dangerous conditions. The film shows the key role of the community’s women in demanding funding for the road from three levels of government, and how their reconnection to culture and ceremony give them the strength to keep going.

A RECORD OF THE STRIKE AT GRUNWICK IN 1977. The story of the continuing struggle at Grunwick’s by mainly Indian workers, from July 11th, 1977 until the struggle was lost. It shows the Special Patrol Group attack on the November 7th day of action, how the leadership of the struggle was taken out of the hands of the strike committee, how some of the strike leaders were disciplined by their own union for going on hunger strike outside the TUC in protest at the TUC’s inactivity, and how the post office workers were forced by their union to end their blacking of Grunwick mail. It also shows the beginnings of the similar struggle by immigrant workers at Garner’s Steak Houses in London.

Aufstand in der Matrix

A satire on celebrity with a cacophony of gossip merchants, publicists, and “a host of stars.”